As television (TV) distribution networks move from one-way distribution toward two-way interactive communication networks and from solutions that allow services to be consumed only in one location toward being consumed anywhere on a wide range of types and sizes of screens, we are about to witness the birth of an entirely new mass market for TV program advertising, interactive games and other services.
Interactivity through wire-line and wireless two-way networks will make it possible for viewers to participate in many ways, such as e.g. enabling users to vote in TV shows, to buy products by interacting with advertisements, and to send personal messages to TV shows. The viewer will have new possibilities when it comes to personalization, such as e.g. the possibility to choose which ads to receive in targeted advertising, how TV programs are to be listed in an electronic program guide (EPG) or which program content to consume and when to consume them.
IPTV offers new revenue opportunities for telecom service providers when it comes to attracting new customers to their networks in order to offset declining voice traffic revenues. It may be that wire-line telecom service providers will move into IPTV to a great extent. With IPTV, telecom service providers can start to compete with TV offerings from cable operators, satellite-TV operators, and other terrestrial service providers. IPTV also helps providers retain existing customers and prevent churn by introducing a bundled offering of Internet, voice, and IPTV services, typically referred to as “triple play”.
IPTV uses web-browser technology to enable IPTV Service Providers to provide media services deployed in communication networks, such as wired and wireless telephone networks. Common Web browser applications enable users to view specific Internet pages and other file locations, accessible by the browser. Each such Web page is typically identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), or similar page address.
In an IPTV system, multimedia streams are encoded as series of IP data packets. Work on IPTV is underway in several contexts, including for example the Open IPTV Forum, which is specifying an end-to-end platform for supplying multimedia and IPTV services to user equipments (UEs) over the Internet and managed networks having controlled quality-of-service (QoS) performance.
In an IPTV system, a UE or IPTV device may be a Set-Top Box (STB) or a TV having integrated STB capabilities. Such a user device may be configured to access IPTV services, e.g., via an IP Multimedia System (IMS). With the ongoing rapid development of new services offered via IPTV distribution, and of user interfaces which enable user-friendly access to such services, there is a problem for the TV manufacturer to be able to provide their IPTV devices with the most suitable service profile already at manufacturing of the IPTV device.